The Document Foundation Planet

 

April 25, 2024

Official TDF Blog

Calc Guide and Writer Guides available for browsing

LibreOffice Guides in HTML

The Documentation team just published the Calc Guide and Writer Guide as on-line pages in the Bookshelf at https://books.libreoffice.org

Presented as web pages, the guides contents can now be accessed with your favorite browser and use the browser resources to navigate, bookmark and reference pages.

Together with the PDF versions, the guides web pages can be downloaded and installed in local networks using a simple web server.

Happy reading!

by Olivier Hallot at April 25, 2024 05:56 PM

April 22, 2024

Official TDF Blog

Community Member Monday: Kira Tubo

Kira Tubo

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in San Jose, California, USA. I’ve lived around the Bay Area my whole life, after my parents moved away from the Philippines when I was about a year old.

I have had experience as a CRM (customer relations management) administrator, which partially functioned sort of like an internal tech support position, and I’ve also done crowdsourced testing and a11y (accessibility) testing as a side hustle. So I’ve had a lot of experience with troubleshooting and manually testing software.

My hobbies/interests are: reading, walking, video games/board games, and my dog.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Right now, I am attempting to write C++ unit tests in LibreOffice. As someone with rudimentary coding skills, it is quite challenging but interesting to learn.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

For the longest time, I’ve been wanting to contribute my technical skills to an open source project and learn about test automation. I saw some forums that suggested LibreOffice, and I thought it may be a good fit because I have also used the product (albeit lightly) in the past. What I like about the LibreOffice project is that there is a dedicated wiki for those interested in QA (not just development). Because of this, it is fairly easy to get started with contributing.

Since I’ve joined the project, I’ve helped the QA team with bug triaging, regression testing, bibisecting, etc. I’ve also submitted patches to Gerrit for some easy code fixes and updated the LibreOffice help documentation. I’ve learned so much and picked up a lot of new skills along the way. But there is definitely a lot more to learn, which is exciting!

I’d also like to say that the people working on the LibreOffice project are fantastic. They acknowledge the work that you do and are more than happy to help you when needed (shoutout to Ilmari Lauhakangas for taking the time to explain how things work to me). So for anyone feeling overwhelmed or hesitant about joining, don’t be! We are all friendly here 🙂

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

One of these days, I’d like to look into writing UI unit tests with Python, and maybe also unit tests for a11y (accessibility). As for improvements, I think perhaps it would be great if the wiki would be a little more beginner-friendly for those who want to get into writing unit tests, especially if they don’t have much development experience yet.

Many thanks to Kira for all her contributions! Every LibreOffice user is welcome to get involved, find out what they can do in our community, and learn new skills along the way �

by Mike Saunders at April 22, 2024 11:54 AM

April 20, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-04-20 Saturday

  • Wedding Anniversary; 22 years of happiness.
  • Off to see R&A's new daughter; exciting. Caught up with blog in the car, up-loaded some slides on background save from COOL days.

April 20, 2024 10:03 AM

April 19, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-04-19 Friday

  • Encouraging design call; lunch, all afternoon workshop. Fixed a couple of bugs, slugged in the evening.
  • Steeled myself to re-subscribe to the Economist - very disappointed by the rules on the Digital subscription making it un-share-able; who would spend that much per person in their household, to replace a paper copy that can be shared ?

April 19, 2024 09:00 PM

April 18, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-04-18 Thursday

  • Tech planning call, COOL community call. Background save, lunch, marketing call, sync. with Eloy on sales. Raced background save deadline fixing more things. Home-group on 1 Thessalonians.

April 18, 2024 09:00 PM

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Crash fixes part 3 – Testing crashes

I have previously discussed fixing crashes in 2 parts (segfaults, aborts). Here I discuss testing crashes to avoid creating re-creating regressions.

Why testing crashes?

When you fix a crash, you have to make sure that it does not happen again in the future. The key to achieve such a goal is to write a suitable test. The test should do the exact steps to reproduce the problem on the program in order to detect the known crash before the new code is merged.

This can be done using either UITests, or CppUnitTests. UITests are written in Python. They are easier to write, but they do not run on each and every platform, and they are usually slower. CppUnitTests, on the other hand, are written in C++. They are much faster, and they run on every platform that CI runs to make sure that everything is built and can be run correctly.

An Example Crash Testing

Consider the below issue around footnotes:

This problem was happening when someone created a footnote, deleted the reference, and then hovered the mouse on the removed footnote reference. To reproduce that, one could use keyboard to generate a key sequence that repeats the required steps:

Write something, add footnote, select all the footnotes and remove them, then go back to the text, and hover the footnote reference.

Using keyboard-only is not always enough, but here it was possible. To implement the UITest, you should first find the appropriate place to put the test file, and then write a Python script for that. Here, the test was written in sw/qa/uitest/writer_tests2/deleteFootnotes.py. The UITest test can be found alongside the bug fix, in the class class tdf150457(UITestCase):

If you look into the code, the test_delete_footnotes() function consists of many invocations of postKeyEvent calls, that emulate key input events:

pTextDoc->postKeyEvent(LOK_KEYEVENT_KEYINPUT, 'a', 0);

To insert footnotes, UNO commands are used.

dispatchCommand(mxComponent, ".uno:InsertFootnote", {});

Just doing the same steps would be enough, as if the crash happens with the fix in place, or in a bad commit in the future, the test would fail. This test failure will prevent the same problem in the future.

The nice thing is that it turned out the same test could have been written using C++ and CppUnitTest, which is considered superior.

The new CppUnitTest can be found in the below change:

The new test resides in sw/qa/extras/uiwriter/uiwriter3.cxx, and essentially uses postKeyEvent and dispatchCommand as similar functions.

If you look at the current version of the test, you can see that it was simplified in later commits, but the idea is the same: “repeat the same steps that lead to crash in the code”.

Final Words

It is expected that every bug fix is accompanied with a test, to avoid seeing the same problem in the future. If you want to know more about UITests and CppUnitTests, please take a look at this TDF Wiki pages:

Also, keep in mind that looking into the existing tests is the best way to understand how to write a new test. Therefore, make sure that you look into qa/ folders of the modules when you want to add a new test.

by Hossein Nourikhah at April 18, 2024 01:40 PM

April 17, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-04-17 Wednesday

  • COOL days retrospective, planning for next year. More background save work, weekly sales call.
  • Partner call. LibreOffice Advisory Board call, Dinner, All Saints band practice.

April 17, 2024 09:00 PM

April 16, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-04-16 Tuesday

  • Planning call, sync. with Richard on slides for Nextcloud Enterprise day, more background save work.

April 16, 2024 09:00 PM

Official TDF Blog

Quick tip: creating “hybrid” PDF files in LibreOffice

Screenshot of PDF export dialog

Here’s a LibreOffice feature you may not know about: when exporting a PDF, the “Hybrid PDF” option embeds the original file. Then anyone with a PDF reader can view the file – and LibreOffice users can edit it too.

Learn more about this feature here

by Mike Saunders at April 16, 2024 01:45 PM

April 11, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: March 2024

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 7.6.6 and LibreOffice 24.2.2 were released on March 28
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) renamed Fontwork to Text along Path in the UI while updating Help, added Help content for ExportAsFixedFormat VBA method and new Calc functions FILTER, SORT and SORTBY and did several cleanups and fixes in Help
  3. Rafael Lima made several improvements to Calc’s Solver dialog, improved the visual consistency of the Tabbed UI and added a warning about the need to reload file after changing macro security level
  4. Stéphane Guillou (TDF) updated Help content after UI changes and improved the Help page for macro security
  5. Alain Romedenne made many improvements to the officehelper Python script for connecting to LibreOffice processes
  6. Dione Maddern rewrote the Help page for Calc’s SUMIF function, updated Help for Writer’s View options and did cleanups in Help
  7. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) did many cleanups in the area of includes while improving the script for finding unneeded includes. He also made some Help fixes
  8. Pierre F. made many improvements and fixes to Help pages, for example in the areas of regular expressions and Basic
  9. Andras Timar (Collabora) made Help build more robust on Windows and made some cleanups in Help regarding translatable strings
  10. Laurent Balland updated Grey Elegant Impress template
  11. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) improved copying and pasting between Google Sheets and Calc and did many code cleanups and improvements to automated tests
  12. Áron Budea, Marco Cecchetti, Gökay Şatır, Pranam Lashkari, Jaume Pujantell and Michael Meeks (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  13. Gülşah Köse (Collabora) made it so pressing Enter in an empty list item ends the list in Impress
  14. Attila Szűcs (Collabora) improved the performance of handling transparent animated GIFs and made it so image placeholders imported from PPTX files do not display text
  15. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) did many code cleanups in graphics code
  16. Julien Nabet fixed incorrect display of custom page numbers in Sidebar, fixed an issue with duplicating a sheet in Calc causing unwanted axis label to appear in charts and fixed some crashes
  17. Andreas Heinisch fixed an issue with saving print ranges to XLS files
  18. Xisco Faulí (TDF) made a dozen additions and changes to automated tests and added a script to replace missing fonts in test documents. He also improved SVG support by implementing overflow:visible, switch element and the filters feMerge, feMergeNode, feBlend and feComposite.
  19. Michael Stahl (allotropia) made the Curl-based WebDAV content provider more robust
  20. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed issues with copying and pasting charts in Calc, fixed an issue causing incorrect closing tags in Writer HTML export, fixed an issue affecting conditional formatting in overlapping cell ranges, made canceling out of Insert Chart dialog more robust in case of multiple views, fixed an issue with picking a connection type in Database Wizard, fixed an issue in the UNO API implementation for text ranges, harmonised the rounding in Calc’s number formatter and ROUND function and made it so index field names can be single characters which is good news for Japanese users
  21. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) improved the performance of threaded calculation in Calc, fixed an issue with Calc’s currency selection dropdown in GTK UIs, improved dark mode support and made “Always autocorrect to” more robust. He also fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers
  22. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build. He also did many code cleanups and adapted the code to compiler changes
  23. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved loading time for PPTX files with lots of unused master slides, improved loading time for DOCX files with lots of headers and footers, optimised the handling of columns in Calc, improved the speed of print preview with large merged rows in spreadsheets. He also did many code cleanups
  24. Justin Luth (Collabora) made the new global config option RecalcOptimalRowHeightMode also work for XLSX files, fixed a crash when trying to overwrite file in read-only directory when its lock file exists, fixed an issue with z-ordering of objects in DOCX files, fixed image placement issues in DOC/DOCX files, made searching backwards for end of paragraph regex work in Writer, fixed an issue causing unwanted toggling of Ordered List button and made it so frame text boundary line in Writer is only shown if display of formatting marks is active
  25. Michael Weghorn (TDF) fixed HiDPI scaling with KF6/Qt6 UIs under Wayland and worked on the accessibility features of GTK4 UI
  26. Balázs Varga (allotropia) added Excel2021 array functions FILTER, SORT and SORTBY to Calc, fixed issues with chart rendering in XLSX files, improved the performance of Calc’s SUMPRODUCT function and fixed an issue with objects not shown in slideshow in a PPTX file if they have fillstyle or linestyle
  27. Patrick Luby (NeoOffice) fixed issues related to the transparency-to-alpha rework, fixed a Skia issue related to a changed default, fixed horizontal swiping and scrolling when using an RTL UI, made it possible to encrypt files with using public GPG keys with unknown Ownertrust on macOS and fixed macOS crashes
  28. Jim Raykowski fixed an issue preventing use of keyboard shortcuts when focused into a tab bar element in the Sidebar, fixed an issue with text selection over pages for multi column tables with repeated headings, improved the name display of custom shapes in the Navigator in Impress/Draw and added a UNO API command to set layer of objects in Draw
  29. Sarper Akdemir (allotropia) made it so a reload is not required for embedded objects to be disabled
  30. Regina Henschel worked on extruded/3D shape support in PPTX files
  31. Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) improved the accessibility checker
  32. Armin Le Grand (allotropia) continued polishing support for editing Impress slides during presentation and continued the rework of handling attributes and properties
  33. Oliver Specht (CIB) made it possible to insert an empty paragraph before an index that is the first element in a Writer document, made Clone Formatting more robust in Impress, added a search field to Gallery and made Cycle Case also work at the end of words
  34. Arnaud Versini did some code cleanups and optimisations
  35. Heiko Tietze (TDF) made Infobar close buttons easier to hit, made Bullets and Numbering dialog cleaner, improved dark mode support and added a “What’s new?” dialog to be shown on first run of a major version
  36. Hossein Nourikhah (TDF) worked on Developers Guide examples and fixed updating hyperlinks in Draw
  37. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) fixed an issue with disappearing text in merged Calc cells and fixed a placeholder box being too tall in PPTX files
  38. Kurt Nordback finished adding a chart type for “pie-with-remainder-as-another-pie” and fixed an issue where stacked column charts did not show connection lines
  39. Taichi Haradaguchi did some cleanups in dialog definition files
  40. Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) improved the code for WinAPI FlashWindow() function that alerts the user about an event in an application
  41. Hubert Figuière (Collabora) worked on jsdialog used by Collabora Online
  42. David Gilbert did code cleanups in PDF import code
  43. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
  44. Leonard Sasse did many cleanups in Python files
  45. Fridrich Štrba fixed building with Java 8 and autoconf 2.72
  46. Vivek Javiya made heading colours dynamic in Calc, allowing for automatic adjustment
  47. László Németh fixed hyphenation at stem boundary by adding a new hyphenation option “Compound characters at line end” and implemented hyphenate-keep paragraph property to keep both parts of a hyphenated word within a single page
  48. Adlair Cerecedo-Mendez added LibreOffice minor version and CPU architecture to PDF metadata
  49. Skyler Grey (Collabora) improved animating of bullets in presentations exported as SVG
  50. René Engelhard (Debian) did build fixes

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

468 bugs, 82 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 297 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. peter josvai ( 20 )
  2. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 17 )
  3. Rafael Lima ( 12 )
  4. Telesto ( 11 )
  5. Jeff Fortin Tam ( 10 )
  6. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 9 )
  7. prrvchr ( 8 )
  8. Michael Otto ( 7 )
  9. Kevin Suo ( 6 )
  10. Mike Kaganski ( 6 )

Triaged Bugs

469 bugs have been triaged by 73 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 149 )
  2. V Stuart Foote ( 29 )
  3. m_a_riosv ( 28 )
  4. Heiko Tietze ( 22 )
  5. Buovjaga ( 20 )
  6. Julien Nabet ( 15 )
  7. Mike Kaganski ( 15 )
  8. Rafael Lima ( 15 )
  9. dunguyen ( 14 )
  10. ady ( 14 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

429 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

143 bugs have been fixed by 35 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 12 )
  2. Caolán McNamara ( 12 )
  3. Julien Nabet ( 8 )
  4. Justin Luth ( 7 )
  5. Pierre F ( 6 )
  6. Xisco Fauli ( 6 )
  7. Patrick Luby ( 6 )
  8. Rafael Lima ( 6 )
  9. Balazs Varga ( 5 )
  10. Noel Grandin ( 5 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#160036 Selection invisible in a11y High Contrast modes with SKIA/Raster, Skia/Vulkan unaffected ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  2. tdf#160095 CRASH: using ALT+RETURN twice ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#142133 Hyperlinks cannot be clicked / interacted with in PDF export of RTF or DOCX files (comment 9) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  2. tdf#152524 macOS: LibreOffice crashes (gpgme / gpgmeio) on macOS 13 Ventura ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  3. tdf#154863 Crash when moving images around in a multipage table ( Thanks to Matt K )
  4. tdf#157258 “Always autocorrect to” deletes the word instead of replacing (affects extensions like Grammalecte, LanguageTool, Antidote) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  5. tdf#159094 FILESAVE PDF Tagged PDF export of media file fails to create PDF ( Thanks to Tibor Nagy )
  6. tdf#159373 Crash in: ScTable::HasAttrib(short,long,short,long,HasAttrFlags) ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  7. tdf#159931 Exported pptx cannot be opened in PowerPoint because a referenced part does not exist ( Thanks to Sarper Akdemir )
  8. tdf#160149 CRASH: undoing conditional format ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  9. tdf#160184 allow to “Encrypt with GPG key” on save using public keys with unknown Ownertrust ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  10. tdf#160365 Writer: unable to turn off “text boundaries” for frames / tables ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  11. tdf#83720 PIVOTTABLE: Wrong date format in column field ( Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl )
  12. tdf#93352 UI. RTL: Horizontal scrolling for right-to-left Sheet moves in opposite direction (macOS and Linux) ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#152524 macOS: LibreOffice crashes (gpgme / gpgmeio) on macOS 13 Ventura ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  2. tdf#154072 crash / no effect when clicking some dropdown buttons when toolbar overflows ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  3. tdf#154863 Crash when moving images around in a multipage table ( Thanks to Matt K )
  4. tdf#158344 FILEOPEN DOCX Crash on opening file ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
  5. tdf#158945 Calc: crash when entering text in a cell ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  6. tdf#159373 Crash in: ScTable::HasAttrib(short,long,short,long,HasAttrFlags) ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  7. tdf#159879 Crash when closing “3D View” dialog ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  8. tdf#159933 crash when applying Solarize filter to raster image ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  9. tdf#160095 CRASH: using ALT+RETURN twice ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  10. tdf#160149 CRASH: undoing conditional format ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  11. tdf#160192 CRASH when trying to overwrite file in read-only directory when its lock file exists ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  12. tdf#160222 LibreOffice 7.6.5 – SF_Session RunApplication crash for unknown reason ( Thanks to Jean-Pierre Ledure )
  13. tdf#160368 Crash on save after deleting sheet ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )

List of performance issues fixed

  1. tdf#159687 Cutting rows from specific file with whole column references in formula is slow ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#103068 New Database Wizard gets confused between ODBC and JDBC connection if you backup twice to step 1. ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  2. tdf#116156 Python // officehelper.py misbehaves since 5.3.7 ( Thanks to Alain Romedenne )
  3. tdf#126464 Remove “Numbering on/off” UNO command ( Thanks to AhmedHamed )
  4. tdf#129292 Writer

by x1sc0 at April 11, 2024 10:04 AM

April 10, 2024

Official TDF Blog

Insights from the InstallFest 2024 conference in Prague

InstallFest 2024

Our Czech community reports back from a recent event…

For the third time, the LibreOffice project had its own booth at InstallFest 2024, and here we present our experiences from the event.

On the weekend of 16th and 17th March 2024, the InstallFest 2024 conference took place at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The conference was held after a two‑year break and under the direction of a new team led by Jan Langmaier. This year, according to the organisers’ estimates, about 300 visitors attended, making InstallFest a successful follow‑up to previous editions. Unfortunately, higher participation is limited by the space capacity of the chosen venue.

The lack of space also affected the LibreOffice booth, which had to be a bit aside from the main event. On the other hand, anyone heading to one of the main lecture halls could not miss us – our exclusive position made us unmissable. Even so, there were far fewer visitors at our booth than in previous years.

Feedback gained at InstallFest

Conferences of this type appeal mainly to the younger generation, who must not be absent. It is therefore not surprising that young people from primary or secondary school are well represented among the visitors at the LibreOffice stand. This year, however, this was significantly more disproportionate than at other times – it can even be said that young people dominated. We always interviewed them, asking what they use LibreOffice for, how long they have been using it, whether it is used at school, where they go, and whether their classmates know about the suite.

The answers were generally similar. LibreOffice tends to be used by young people for basic tasks such as writing texts, creating presentations for school and so on. Those who create presentations in Impress for school assignments have to convert their presentations to PPTX format. Surprisingly, we’ve had good feedback on compatibility with this format, although it is of course problematic.

InstallFest 2024

Very few visitors know about the cloud or mobile versions of LibreOffice, but there are some. We were surprised that one high school student reported using the cloud‑based, non‑paid version of OnlyOffice; after learning about the circumstances (ie that this software is in Russian hands and thus subject to EU sanctions), he understood why the institute he was working with (apparently a non‑profit of some sort) did not want to purchase the paid version of OnlyOffice. It simply cannot.

Many visitors would welcome some changes in LibreOffice’s user interface. While some prefer the traditional toolbar layout, others prefer a Microsoft Office‑like look and feel – either for personal taste or for ease of transition from Microsoft Office. LibreOffice allows you to use different interfaces, but this option is hidden in the menus. Visitors would appreciate if, when LibreOffice is first launched, a wizard were displayed to guide the newcomer through the various setup and customisation options, including user interface selection.

We received a request from one tutor to allow multiplication of a combinational number by a combinational number in LibreOffice Calc, and also to simplify the notation of simple arithmetic operations such as multiplication and division. Currently this has to be done using verbally defined functions, so he would welcome the ability to use simple symbols typed from the keyboard.

InstallFest 2024

Although it would seem that office software cannot attract the attention of youngsters, one ninth-grader stayed with us for perhaps an hour. Obviously he was the record holder.

Zdenek Crhonek has a huge part in translating the LibreOffice manuals into Czech. These manuals are translated by a whole bunch of volunteers, and we displayed their covers here.
Traditionally, Collabora Online, the cloud version of LibreOffice, which is now very stable and usable and with a really extensive arsenal of features, attracted a lot of interest.

There were many interesting meetings of people who often only know each other from the virtual world; that’s what these conferences are for. A regular visitor to our booth is Ladislav Sieger, PhD., from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering CTU. He always has a problem to solve, an observation, or a comment.

After party

A very interesting opportunity (and meeting) was a visit to the basement of Strahov’s dormitories, where the SH Bastlíři (translated “DYI makers”) created their own facilities, a workshop that is available to (almost) everyone. Here you can come across a server rack on the ceiling of the toilet, a circular machine, a 3D printer and other interesting things. The visit to these premises was followed by a dinner at a nearby restaurant, where the participants from among the organizers (including speakers, technical staff, exhibitors) were taken by a chartered bus (!).

InstallFest 2024

Conclusion

The new organising team has done its task well. If there were problems, we are not aware of them; that is, they were of a completely minor nature. For us, the biggest problem was with the location of the stand; perhaps this played a role in the rather low attendance of interested people. Although we probably had the most space of all in the end and did not have to make any space constraints, we may not have reached as many visitors as we could have.

However, the other perspective should also be taken into account. Although LibreOffice plays a primary role in the world of open‑source software, it is considered a utility that does not attract as much visitor interest. Therefore, we have tentatively agreed with the organisers to change that next time on our side, and they have promised to help us.

Anyway, those who visited our booth hopefully took something away with them (besides stickers and leaflets), especially thanks to Zdeněk, who maintains a lively communication with LibreOffice’s front‑line staff and has information literally first‑hand. He can thus provide far more insider insight than one Czech community member alone on the stand could in previous years.

All of the talks were filmed and the recordings are available on YouTube.

by Mike Saunders at April 10, 2024 11:11 AM

April 08, 2024

Official TDF Blog

Community Member Monday: Adam Seskunas

Adam Seskunas

Tell us a bit about yourself!

My name is Adam Seskunas and I currently live in San Diego, California. In my free time I enjoy outdoor activities, hiking, backpacking in the Sierra, rock climbing and surfing with my daughter Sofia. I have a degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Global Campus, and I’m an open source software enthusiast.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Currently I’m working on my first “Difficulty Interesting” Easy Hack, a nice description of which can be found on this page.

The Easy Hack involves the ASCII filter for LibreOffice Writer and the way it handles the output of tables. True to its name, the Easy Hack has been interesting! It’s been challenging and rewarding at the same time. I’d like to thank Hossein Nourikhah for providing the code pointers and background information, and Michael Weghorn for help in code review.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

I’ve been using LibreOffice ever since I became interested in using Linux, when I was studying for my Computer Science degree, but I never had considered contributing. It’s such a large project, and I had no experience with C++. I just happened to see an advert on VolunteerMatch for bug testing, and answering the ad got me in contact with Ilmari Lauhakangas.

Ilmari would meet with me bi-weekly and he taught me how to verify bugs in Bugzilla and eventually got me into developing. Overall, joining the project been a fantastic experience, from Ilmari’s mentorship to all the people involved – everyone’s been great. I’d highly recommend it to anyone.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

My plan is to apply and hopefully get accepted to do Google Summer of Code for LibreOffice. I’ve been talking to Hossein about ideas and I’m excited to get my application written and submitted.

What does LibreOffice really need now?

I’d say more contributors. There’s a robust community of contributors, but any project could use more. It’s a great way to meet people and gain some experience. I’d encourage anyone reading this and thinking about contributing to check out the wiki. There’s great information there and you can help in many different ways, not just development.

Many thanks to Adam for all his contributions! Every LibreOffice user is welcome to get involved and find out what they can do in our community �

by Mike Saunders at April 08, 2024 11:18 AM

April 04, 2024

Miklos Vajna

Improve copy&paste in Calc and elsewhere

Calc now supports much better copy&paste when you transfer data between Google Sheets and Calc.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is fully available in desktop Calc as well.

Motivation

First, Collabora Online was using the deprecated document.execCommand() API to paste text, which is problematic, as the "paste" button on the toolbar can't behave the same way as pressing Ctrl-V on the keyboard.

Second, it turns out Google Sheets came up with some additional HTML attributes to represent spreadsheet data in HTML in a much better way, and Calc HTML import/export had no support for this, while this is all fixable.

Results so far

In short, Collabora Online now uses the Clipboard API to read from the system clipboard -- this has to be supported by the integration, and Calc's HTML filter now support the subset of the Google Sheets markup I figured out so far. This subset is also documented.

Note that the default behavior is that the new Clipboard API is available in Chrome/Safari, but not in Firefox.

For the longer version, here are some screenshots:

We used to show a popup when you clicked on the paste button on the notebookbar

The new paste code in action, handling an image

Import from Google Sheets to Calc: text is auto-converted to a number, bad

Import from Google Sheets to Calc: text is no longer auto-converted to a number, good

HTML import into an active cell edit, only RTF was working there previously

Paste from Google Sheets to Calc: text is no longer auto-converted to a number, good

Paste from Google Sheets to Calc: booleans are now also preserved

Paste from Google Sheets to Calc: number formats are now also preserved

Paste from Google Sheets to Calc: formulas are now also preserved

Paste from Google Sheets to Calc: also handling a single cell

Copy from Calc to Google Sheets: text is now handled, no longer auto-converted to a number

Copy from Calc to Google Sheets: booleans are now handled

Cross-origin iframes also block clipboard access, now fixed

Copy from Calc to Google Sheets: number formats are now also preserved

Copy from Calc to Google Sheets: formulas are now also preserved

Copy from COOL Writer to a text editor: much better result, new one on the right hand side

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:

The tracking issue on the Online side was cool#8023.

Want to start using this?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (24.8).

by Miklos Vajna at April 04, 2024 07:50 AM

March 18, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Test improvement – More and better tests for LibreOffice

One of the areas that can help LibreOffice, but may not directly be visible to the users even though it has a big impact is the quality assurance, is automated testing.  Here, I discuss some areas and notes around improving tests for LibreOffice. First, I start with regressions and bug fixes without a test.

Missing Unit Tests

This is the description from the GSoC ideas page:

While there are some automated tests for LibreOffice, there are not nearly enough. Adding more and better tests helps developers who work on the code to be more productive by allowing them to find regressions as early as possible.

To elaborate more, I should say there are many regressions and bugs in general that are fixed, but lack testing. It is important to have tests for those bug fixes, to avoid such problems in the future. You can see a list of those fixed issues that lack tests here:

If you want to add some new tests for the bug fixes, first you should read the bug report very carefully to understand what is it about, and try to test the fix yourself. You can either use git revert command to revert the fix, and see the problem in action, or try changing back the fix in the code, if it is not too big.

That is important, because you have to see that the test fails without the fix in place, but succeeds when it is applied. This is an essential step when writing the test.

To know more about unit tests, you may look into these Wiki pages:

Porting Existing Test to C++ or Python

Some tests are written in the past, but now have issues because of the way they are written. In this case, porting them can provide improvement.

Tests can be written in multiple languages. At least, C++, Python, Java and BASIC are currently in use for different tests across the LibreOffice code base. Again in the GSoC ideas page, you can read:

There is some support in LibreOffice for automated tests, both at the level of unit tests, and at the level of system tests that drive a full LibreOffice instance. Currently tests can be written in C++, Java, or Python. Various new automated tests should be developed to improve the test coverage.

Tests written exclusively for Java (e.g. the JUnit framework) should be ported to C++ so that they can execute much more rapidly. Similarly, tests that do remote control of an existing LibreOffice instance, should be re-factored to run inside that instance to make debugging much easier.

Almost all JUnitTests and UITests, and also some smoke tests, run as an outside process. To verify, the trick is to remove the soffice(.exe) binary, or to remove its execute permission (on Linux). In this way, out-of-process tests should fail, as they need to run the soffice binary. After a successful build, you can see if this works. For example, try this:

make -d JunitTest_framework_complex

As an example, we have this issue around complex tests that should be ported to Python:

You may find many examples of the previously ported test in the issue page. Keep in mind that usually old Java tests should be removed in the same patch that provides the CppUnitTest port.

Also, you may find examples of UITests ported to C++ from Python. For example, see this patch:

It ports a previously implemented UITest from Python to C++. The result is a faster test, which is more robust.

Focusing on a Specific Area

If you want to add or port some tests, please focus on a specific area of the code. The LibreOffice code base is huge, and consists of more than 200 modules. It is not easy, and in fact not suggested, to work across different applications and modules. It is much better that you pick a specific application, and even inside that application, like Writer, Calc, Impress, etc., focus on a specific module. In this way, it would be much easier to understand the ideas and the way tests are implemented.

How Hard is it to Write / Port a Test?

One important question is around the complexity of writing or porting tests. The answer is not straightforward, as it depends on the area that the test is written. But one can take a look at what others did in the past. By looking into Gerrit or git log, you can find what other people, including GSoC applicants, were able to achieve during their work.

After writing a few tests, or porting a few tests, it may become easier for you to write more tests. Another thing is that you don’t have to write tests from scratch. There are many tests available in the LibreOffice code base, and you can create your new test based on existing tests and customize it to match the purpose of the issue you are working on.

by Hossein Nourikhah at March 18, 2024 06:45 AM

March 11, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: February 2024

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 7.6.5 was released on February 22
  2. LibreOffice 24.2.1 was released on February 29
  3. Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help content for Calc’s XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions, Navigate By in Find toolbar, Draw’s Shrink text on overflow and did many fixed and cleanups in Help
  4. Rafael Lima made it so selected text in the BASIC editor is automatically inserted into the search bar, added a command for toggling code block commenting in BASIC IDE and fixed an issue where Duplicate Sheet command might create the sheet in the wrong file, if having two open files with the same name
  5. Stanislav Horacek updated command paths in Help
  6. Stéphane Guillou (TDF) updated command paths in Help
  7. Alain Romedenne updated ScriptForge Help pages, updated Python shell script Help for macOS and improved Python example in SDK
  8. Dione Maddern did many fixes and updates to Help pages, mostly fixing links
  9. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) made some cleanups in Help and in UI and UNO bridges code
  10. Laurent Balland fixed an issue with skip empty cells option not working for the last column in Calc Text Import dialog, made it so custom number formats using the ? character replace trailing zeroes with figure spaces which have a width approximating a digit and removed unneeded thumbnail.png images from Wizard templates
  11. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) added legal numbering support for DOC and RTF files, made Calc HTML import support data-sheets attributes, made Calc’s cell editing accept pasted HTML fragments, made DOCX content control handling more robust and continued polishing floating table support
  12. Szymon Kłos, Gülşah Köse, Marco Cecchetti, Gökay Şatır, Pranam Lashkari, Michael Meeks and Méven Car (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  13. Attila Szűcs (Collabora) fixed PPTX issues with multiline field wrapping and stacked text
  14. Henry Castro (Collabora) tweaked Calc’s background colour filter to not extend transparent colours to empty cells and fixed an issue with Sidebar not displaying the full localised currency string for cell properties
  15. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) made it so the currencies used in a spreadsheet are put at the top of the currency pop-up list, made pivot table data cache handling smarter and improved the handling of XLS documents with unknown DRM encryption (mainly due to some Excel addons)
  16. Julien Nabet fixed an issue where Data validation without error check allowed entering incorrect data, fixed LOWER not being supported in Base’s Query-GUI if condition was LIKE and fixed an issue with Calc Macro setting SearchWildcard to False changing SearchRegularExpression value. He also fixed some crashes
  17. Andreas Heinisch made Calc’s Autofilter sorting and removing duplicates more robust and made it so a single click is enough to access options through Calc’s status bar
  18. Xisco Faulí (TDF) made over a dozen additions and changes to automated tests, improved dark mode support of Writer comment UI, fixed an issue with Autofilter empty option, made SVG text baseline handling more intuitive, added support for in and result SVG filter attributes and fixed a crash
  19. Michael Stahl (allotropia) added support for cropped images in RTF import, fixed an issue with unwanted formatting in DOCX numbered lists, fixed page style for even/odd section breaks in RTF/DOCX import and fixed a memory leak related to copying Writer content
  20. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) made many improvements to repairing broken documents, implemented auto-accelerator feature on Windows, fixed an issue with PDF compliance, fixed an issue with vertical alignment of math formulas, fixed an issue preventing Select All in Writer from working when section at the start of document body was hidden, made the handling of temporary directories more robust, fixed an issue with unwanted wrapping in Calc and fixed crashes. He also restored a Boost library patch related to Windows locales, which was found to work around a Windows bug causing a hang after opening file dialogs
  21. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) improved dark mode support for charts and optimised Calc’s performance. He also fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers
  22. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build. He also did many code cleanups and adapted the code to compiler changes
  23. Noel Grandin (Collabora) dramatically improved the memory use when exporting a PDF with lots of small graphics and expanded mergedlibs build support. He also did many code cleanups
  24. Justin Luth (Collabora) made many improvements to VML and DML graphics support and gradient support in Microsoft document formats, fixed an issue with unwanted optimal row height in XLSX import and made it so applied date/time language is detected in Impress’s insert header/footer dialog
  25. Michael Weghorn (TDF) worked on bringing native Qt widgets to Qt/KDE UI, fixed clipboard issues affecting Qt-based UIs under Wayland on Linux, added support for module-specific window icons on Wayland and fixed accessibility issues in areas such as the Navigator and Calc’s rows and columns
  26. Balázs Varga (allotropia) made the recently-added Calc XLOOKUP function implementation more robust, added Excel2021 function XMATCH to Calc and added a global config setting RecalcOptimalRowHeightMode for optimal row height recalculation when loading spreadsheets
  27. Patrick Luby (NeoOffice) made many improvements to certificate management on macOS, worked around a nasty bug in Apple’s toolchain hampering debugging, fixed a performance issue related to font handling on macOS and fixed many macOS crashes
  28. Jim Raykowski made Draw less jumpy when deleting pages, made “New style from selection” work in Impress and Draw, revamped Writer Navigator’s go to page spin control, made keyboard shortcuts work when focus is in toolbar in all UIs and improved the layout of the top toolbox of the Navigator
  29. Sarper Akdemir (allotropia) added a panel that shows presenter notes in editing view in Impress
  30. Regina Henschel fixed an issue with snap guides disappearing in Impress and Draw and took the first step in implementing 3D element support for PPTX import
  31. Sahil Gautam added a selection locking feature to Calc’s Autofilter
  32. Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) tweaked highlighting in Navigator, so headings get highlighted instead of bookmarks residing in them, added an option to not write temporary file next to local file to provide a better experience with Samba network shares and made it possible to modify default bullet selection in Writer
  33. Armin Le Grand (allotropia) implemented support for editing Impress slides during presentation and continued the rework of handling attributes and properties
  34. Oliver Specht (CIB) fixed an issue where the paragraph end Pilcrow character changed to a different one, if a symbol font was used, fixed importing checkboxes from RTF files, fixed selection in Writer tables with split/merged cells, made special character dialog respect the recently used font, added Writer table sidebar controls to change table alignment and left/right spacing, made it possible to use Cycle Case when cursor is at the beginning or end of a word and not only inside it, improved compatibility with RTF tables, added support for paper tray settings in RTF and DOCX files, made it so Clone Formatting in Impress only applies paragraph attributes from and to fully selected paragraphs and made it so dash replacement autocorrection also works between sentences
  35. Matt K fixed a couple of Writer crashes
  36. Arnaud Versini did some code cleanups
  37. Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) fixed an issue causing text in shapes to be lost when exporting Impress presentations to SVG and implemented reading simple solid fills from the fill styles list in a Visio file theme
  38. Heiko Tietze (TDF) improved the look of Writer comments, made the Keep Ratio setting more intuitive in the Position and Size dialog and made infobar appearances uncluttered
  39. Hossein Nourikhah (TDF) made the build configure error out, if a buggy Windows SDK version is found
  40. Omkar Acharekar worked on bringing native Qt widgets to Qt/KDE UI as part of an Outreachy project
  41. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) fixed an issue where the layout of content to be printed from Calc was not refreshed when changing the orientation
  42. Kurt Nordback worked on adding a chart type for “pie-with-remainder-as-another-pie”
  43. Taichi Haradaguchi updated some dependencies and fixed a link in Help
  44. Juan C. Sanz made it so Firebird embedded databases get their data saved automatically regardless of whether or not the save button is pressed
  45. Ashod Nakashian (Collabora) fixed corner-case issues with DOCX content controls and change tracking
  46. Yiğit Akçay added a feature for enclosing selected text in parentheses/brackets or quotation marks in Writer
  47. Vladislav Tarakanov fixed an issue with slideshow navigation bar, where double-clicking would advance three slides
  48. Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) fixed an issue with field styles in RTF import
  49. Áron Budea (Collabora) did some code cleanups
  50. Hubert Figuière and Vivek Javiya (Collabora) worked on jsdialog used in Collabora Online
  51. Akshay Warrier added a goto page/slide dialog for Impress and Draw
  52. Kevin Ottens fixed backup copy creation for files on mounted Samba shares
  53. David Gilbert fixed a PDF import performance issue involving tiling pattern fills
  54. Po-Yen Huang fixed an issue with Calc’s ROUND function producing inconsistent results in some cases (co-authored with Franklin Weng and Firefly
  55. Kohei Yoshida optimised Calc’s performance
  56. Zeph Chai translated an ODK example from Java to Python

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

477 bugs, 55 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 313 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 23 )
  2. Mike Kaganski ( 11 )
  3. lvm ( 11 )
  4. Telesto ( 10 )
  5. Rafael Lima ( 9 )
  6. Xisco Faulí ( 9 )
  7. Regina Henschel ( 8 )
  8. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 7 )
  9. Adalbert Hanßen ( 7 )
  10. Olivier Hallot ( 7 )

Triaged Bugs

458 bugs have been triaged by 79 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 86 )
  2. Buovjaga ( 45 )
  3. Heiko Tietze ( 29 )
  4. Julien Nabet ( 29 )
  5. V Stuart Foote ( 22 )
  6. Mike Kaganski ( 21 )
  7. ady ( 21 )
  8. m_a_riosv ( 21 )
  9. Xisco Faulí ( 21 )
  10. Dieter ( 16 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

419 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

147 bugs have been fixed by 40 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 15 )
  2. Xisco Fauli ( 9 )
  3. Michael Stahl ( 8 )
  4. Miklos Vajna ( 8 )
  5. Oliver Specht ( 7 )
  6. Noel Grandin ( 6 )
  7. Olivier Hallot ( 6 )
  8. Justin Luth ( 5 )
  9. Patrick Luby ( 5 )
  10. Heiko Tietze ( 5 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#157135 LibreOffice 7.6 stalls/crashes under Windows 11 with Norwegian (Bokmål) locale when opening file dialog ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  2. tdf#159707 CRASH: Changing to edit mode ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#126638 macOS: Can’t paste, copy, cut or ⌘A (select all) using keyboard shortcuts in Save-As field (workaround: comment 38) ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  2. tdf#127293 Add XLOOKUP function in Calc ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )
  3. tdf#149499 CRASH: inserting page break and undoing ( Thanks to Matt K )
  4. tdf#156352 macOS: Save as > Encrypt with GPG key results in hang / crash ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  5. tdf#159302 Formula OLE in a line of text or its full height frame is now misaligned vertically, due to change of sm map units ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  6. tdf#159519 LibreOffice 24.2.0.3 (Windows 7) ODF files saved with passwords can be opened without any password ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  7. tdf#159529 Excessive memory consumption in v24.2 ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  8. tdf#159581 FILEOPEN XLSX 24.2: optimal row height from previous sheet may be applied to all future sheets ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  9. tdf#159743 German UI: Many not plausible Keyboard Shortcut Changes ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  10. tdf#54169 LibO doesn’t obey Windows OS setting “only show the accelerator underline when the Alt key is being pressed” ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  11. tdf#55004 backup copy fails when using share / samba (if nobrl cifs mount option not used) ( Thanks to Kevin Ottens )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#147731 Crash in SwFrameFormat::~SwFrameFormat() ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  2. tdf#149499 CRASH: inserting page break and undoing ( Thanks to Matt K )
  3. tdf#155710 Calc crashes

by x1sc0 at March 11, 2024 12:21 PM

March 01, 2024

Miklos Vajna

February 29, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Writer tables converted to plain text – difficultyInteresting EasyHack

If you copy contents from LibreOffice Writer to a plain text editor like gedit or Notepad, you will see that it does a straightforward thing: It copies the text and some basic formatting like converting bullets to ‘•’. For the Writer tables, the conversion is very simple right now: every cell is written in a separate line.

For example, if you have a table like this:

A | B
--|--
C | D

When you copy the table from LibreOffice Writer and paste it into a plain text editor, it will become something like this, which is not always desirable.

A
B
C
D

It is requested that like LibreOffice Calc, or Microsoft Word, and many other programs, the copy/paste mechanism should create a text like this:

A	B
C	D

The columns are separated by <tab>.

This feature request is filed in Bugzilla as tdf#144576:

Code pointers for Handling Writer tables

There are many steps in copy/pasting, including the data/format conversion and clipboard format handling. Here, you have to know that the document is converted to plain text via “text” filter.

The plaintext (ASCII) filter is located here in the LibreOffice core source code:

Therefore, to change the copy/paste output, you have to fix the ASCII filter. That would also provide the benefit that plain text export will be also fixed as requested here.

In this folder, there are a few files:

$ ls sw/source/filter/ascii/
ascatr.cxx parasc.cxx wrtasc.cxx wrtasc.hxx

To change the output, you have to edit this file:

In this file, there is a loop dedicated to create the output.

// Output all areas of the pam into the ASC file
do {
    bool bTstFly = true;
    ...
}

Inside this loop, the code iterates over the nodes inside the document structure, and extracts text from them. To check for yourself, add the one line below to the code, build LibreOffice, and then test. You will see that a * is appended before each node.

SwTextNode* pNd = m_pCurrentPam->GetPoint()->GetNode().GetTextNode();
if( pNd )
{
+   Strm().WriteUChar('*');
    ...
}

For example, having this table, with 1 blank paragraph up and down:

A | B
--|--
C | D

You will get this after copy/paste into a plain text editor:

*
*a
*b
*c
*d
*

To fix the bug, you have to differentiate between table cells and other nodes. Then, you should take care of the table columns and print tab between them.

To go further, you can only add star before table cells:

if( pNd )
{
    SwTableNode *pTableNd = pNd->FindTableNode();
+   if (pTableNd)
+   {
+       Strm().WriteUChar('*');
+    }
    ...
}

You can look into how other filters handled tables. For example, inside sw/source/filter/html/htmltab.cxx you will see how table is managed, first cell is tracked and appropriate functions to handle HTML table are called.

For the merged cells, the EasyHacker should first checks the behavior in other software, then design and implement the appropriate behavior.

Final Words

To gain a better understanding of the Writer document model / layout, please see this document:

This presentation is also very helpful to gain a good understanding of Writer development:

Introduction to Writer Development – LibreOffice 2023 Conference Workshop, Miklos Vajna

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by Hossein Nourikhah at February 29, 2024 03:01 PM

February 22, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Make Impress master slides copyable – difficulty interesting EasyHack

When working with LibreOffice Impress, “Slide Master” is the place where you can change the templates used for different types of the slides used in your presentation. Here we discuss a possible improvement for the “Slide Master” by making the copy from master slides possible.

Copying the Master Page in Impress

To see the problem and the room for enhancement, open LibreOffice Impress, then choose “View->Master->Slide Master” from the menus. Then, try to copy the master page on the left in the slide sorter. Unfortunately, it is not possible.

Impress slide master

Impress slide master

Having this feature is helpful, because different page types have many things in common, and being able to copy/paste helps creating templates much faster.

Impress Code Pointers

Looking into sd/source/core/drawdoc3.cxx, you can see a huge function SdDrawDocument::InsertBookmarkAsPage, which is relevant here. It contains ~600 lines of code. This huge function is in itself a problem. Therefore, to implement the enhancement, on should try to first refactor the function, then add a unit test in sd/qa/unit, find and then separate all the ~6 use cases, and fix the style/name merging.

After the cleanup, the main fix should be implemented. The suggested path to implement this comes from Jean-Francois. He suggest to improve the duplicate() method, which is described in the documentation:

As described in the above documentation, its role is to duplicate a page:

Creates a duplicate of a DrawPage or MasterPage, including the Shapes on that page and inserts it into the same model.

However, the implementation does not work for master slides, as the macros in the attachment file implies. The solution should add the needed implementation for master slides.

The implementation is inside sd/source/ui/unoidl/unomodel.cxx inside duplicate function:

// XDrawPageDuplicator
uno::Reference< drawing::XDrawPage > SAL_CALL SdXImpressDocument::duplicate( const uno::Reference< drawing::XDrawPage >& xPage )
{

...

}

Final Words

The above issue is filed as tdf#45617. If you like to work on it, just follow the Bugzilla link to see more information.

To implement this feature, first you have to build LibreOffice from the sources. If you have not done that yet, please refer to this guide first:

Getting Started (Video Tutorial)

by Hossein Nourikhah at February 22, 2024 02:57 PM

February 13, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: January 2024

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.2 was released on January, 31
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) fixed a duplicate Covariance command in Notebookbar UIs, updated menu item paths in Help pages and updated Help pages for conversion filters and style Spotlight
  3. Rafael Lima added a Color Scheme switcher to Basic IDE, added a “Delete Comment” command to the Navigator context menu, fixed drawing comment triangles in Calc at all zoom levels, made it so the visibility of UI components in the Basic IDE is remembered, made Basic IDE highlight the line where the cursor is positioned, made it possible to open the “Go to Line” dialog from the statusbar in Basic IDE, fixed Calc AutoFilter arrow color in dark mode, made it so line numbering and breakpoint in Basic IDE are on the left even in right-to-left UI and fixed a crash in Dialog Editor. He also improved the ScriptForge Help pages
  4. Stanislav Horacek updated menu paths in Help alongside other cleanups and fixes
  5. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) removed unnecessary images from SVG icon themes, saving nearly 5 MB of space. He also changed the Help CSS to account for a quirk in Safari
  6. Stéphane Guillou (TDF) continued linking Sidebar decks to Help
  7. Alain Romedenne updated ScriptForge Help pages
  8. Dione Maddern did many fixes and updates to Draw dialog Help pages
  9. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) added accessible descriptions to new Dublin Core metadata boxes, updated Help after removal of FTP protocol support and did code cleanups in the area of code simplification and includes
  10. Laurent Balland did cleanups in the metadata of Impress templates
  11. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) fixed the layout handling of empty paragraphs formatted as superscript in Writer, added support for HTML paste to Writer shape text or Calc cell text edit and continued polishing support for multi-page floating tables in Writer
  12. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
  13. Gabriel Masei (1&1), Paris Oplopoios, Szymon Kłos, Méven Car, Andras Timar, Attila Szűcs and Áron Budea (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online. Andras also fixed some FreeBSD build issues while Attila fixed hyperlink colouring in certain PPTX files and a textbox vertical alignment inversion issue when saving PPTX files
  14. Henry Castro (Collabora) made the status bar in Calc work as expected with language selection
  15. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) made it so the maximum number of hours that can be entered into a Calc cell with time formatting is now a 32-bit integer instead of 65535
  16. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued refactoring the EditEngine text editing code
  17. Julien Nabet fixed an issue preventing some position parameters to go beyond 17 mm in Writer, fixed an issue that made ReportBuilder wizards show two different data sources, fixed several crashes and did code cleanups
  18. Andreas Heinisch made it so font, highlight and background colour in toolbar buttons is remembered between sessions, fixed canceling Text Import in Calc locking the document and made it so question mark can be used in autotext shortcuts
  19. László Németh continued polishing support for smart justify found in DOCX files and implemented ODF attribute fo:hyphenate to exclude a portion of text from hyphenation
  20. Xisco Faulí (TDF) fixed a regression with multiline text exported to PDF as one line, added support for viewBox in symbol elements in SVG import and made nearly 20 additions and improvements to automated tests
  21. Michael Stahl (allotropia) continued polishing revamped ODF encryption, fixed a regression preventing editing of index entries in Writer, worked on WASM build, fixed a Writer issue causing objects to disappear after undo followed by Enter due to invisible anchor selection and fixed slowness if Style Inspector visible during PDF export
  22. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) made font substitution more robust, implemented support for inserting Unicode decimal codes via Alt+NumPad on Windows, fixed storing URLs in DOCX files, fixed a Writer formatting error in paragraphs with justified text, fixed PPTX import of graphic placeholder with a custom prompt, made it so Delete and Backspace move the cursor correctly in change tracking mode, fixed floating content controls importing from DOCX as separate paragraphs, improved the debugging experience in Visual Studio, fixed autotext / word completion tooltips not showing up, fixed an issue with saving word completion options, improved the IDE integration build code, got rid of unwanted space between footnote number and following text, when paragraph has hanging indent in imported DOCX files, fixed passing Integer-sized Long argument via script.invoke in BASIC, fixed unwanted interleaving of bookmark starts and ends and fixed updating path to library when it is renamed using Basic Macro Organizer. He also fixed crashes and did code cleanups
  23. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed an issue causing Similarities dialog to not appear in Base, made optimal column width in Calc more robust, fixed an issue with checkboxes under GTK3 not being disabled when settings are locked down from config, fixed an issue with Hyperlink dialog width growing too large with long text in clipboard, improved Calc performance by reducing window content invalidations and enabled Small Caps toolbar button in Impress. He also fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers
  24. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on the online update feature and WASM build and fixed an issue preventing certificate manager use. He also did many code cleanups and adapted the code to compiler changes
  25. Noel Grandin (Collabora) optimised opening files on Unixes, fixed an issue causing Paste as RTF to lose character color and paragraph alignment from styles, improved scrolling performance in Calc and made cryptographic signing more robust. He also did many code cleanups
  26. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed a problem with tracked changes showing in Start Center thumbnail, fixed various cases of context menu not appearing in Writer when right-clicking the last half character, fixed an object z-order issue in DOCX files, fixed loss of number formatting in charts in DOCX import, fixed DOCX export issues causing unwanted overlapping of objects, fixed unwanted offset added to shapes in headers in DOCX import and fixed issues with pie chart import in OOXML files
  27. Michael Weghorn (TDF) worked on bringing native Qt widgets to Qt/KDE UI and fixed accessibility issues in areas such as shortcuts. He also did many updates and cleanups to the LibreOffice Android Viewer code
  28. Balázs Varga (allotropia) fixed an issue with copying master slide style in PPTX documents, made it so the user is taken straight to the Security Options and Warnings dialog after clicking the relevant button in an infobar notification and made accessibility warnings about simulated numbering smarter
  29. Patrick Luby (NeoOffice) fixed many macOS crashes and a hang on iOS during export
  30. Jim Raykowski made Spotlight more elegant by only showing it for styles that are used in the document, fixed a hyperlink editing crash while having Navigator open and made it possible to insert cross references from Navigator by dragging and dropping
  31. Sarper Akdemir (allotropia) continued working on the feature for disabling active content, fixed an issue with background image shifting down in presentation mode in PPTX files and made it so Dublin Core meta data attribute dc:date is added to exported PDF files
  32. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) fixed packaging of Noto fonts on macOS, fixed an issue with Windows build signing, added Armenian language pack and fixed Windows aarch64 cross-build
  33. Regina Henschel fixed an issue with line break missing from RTF clipboard data after copying shape text
  34. Sahil Gautam added a UI label for page preview zoom slider and made Calc cell cursor more accessible for colour blind users
  35. Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) made the removal of meta data more extensive when the option to remove it when saving is active, implemented resizing of Writer comment section, made it so only documents from the current module are shown by default in Recent Documents and fixed an issue with an empty chart title getting unwanted text in imported PPTX files
  36. Thorsten Behrens (allotropia) fixed build issues related to certain libraries, fixed an xpdfimport crash with missing fonts, made MAR-based LibreOffice updater non-experimental and wholesome ODF package encryption the default
  37. Armin Le Grand (allotropia) continued the rework of handling attributes and properties
  38. Oliver Specht (CIB) made it so that upon entering a legacy text fieldmark in Writer, placeholder text gets pre-selected, made sure paper tray settings are respected when importing RTF and DOCX files and made clone formatting switch off lists
  39. Matt K fixed an issue with conditional formatting getting lost when moving Calc sheets around and fixed many crashes
  40. Adam Seskunas added an automated test for moving focus to inserted image in Writer
  41. Arnaud Versini did some code cleanups
  42. Darshan Upadhyay, Jaume Pujantell and Vivek Javiya (Collabora) worked on jsdialog used by Collabora Online. Jaume also made font embedding in DOCX files more robust
  43. Heiko Tietze (TDF) made Template Manager cleaner by hiding useless buttons, made the options in Image compression dialog behave more logically and improved the look of Calc comment indicator
  44. Hossein Nourikhah (TDF) added a minimal Python extension as an example, fixed a JUnit test not running and decreased the maximum number of columns in Calc’s data entry form to prevent performance issues
  45. Skyler Grey (Collabora) added a Calc option to keep edit mode on Enter/Tab, particularly useful for devices with an onscreen keyboard
  46. Gökay Şatır (Collabora) fixed Ignore All not working with LanguageTool spellchecking errors
  47. Omkar Acharekar worked on bringing native Qt widgets to Qt/KDE UI as part of an Outreachy project
  48. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) made Calc support creation of accessible PDFs, fixed many other accessible PDF issues and fixed an issue with table styles in PPTX import
  49. Kurt Nordback fixed an issue with combo chart render order
  50. Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) fixed Calc view invalidation issues
  51. Dennis Francis (Collabora) improved the performance of conditional formatting in Calc
  52. Matthew Kogan fixed an issue with an unwanted space appearing at start of line when field wraps
  53. Kevin Suo made it so Empty and Error entries are shown as non-selected and inactive when hidden by autofilter
  54. Eli Schwartz (Arch Linux) improved the portability of shell scripts
  55. Bayram Çiçek (Collabora) made inactive Calc sheets movable and copyable
  56. Xuan Chen fixed a Java UNO bridge test failure on riscv64 CPU architecture
  57. Winfried Donkers added Excel2021 function XLOOKUP to Calc

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

515 bugs, 76 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 297 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 40 )
  2. Xisco Faulí ( 19 )
  3. Telesto ( 16 )
  4. Mike Kaganski ( 12 )
  5. Tracey ( 10 )
  6. Rafael Lima ( 10 )
  7. Robert Großkopf ( 9 )
  8. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 9 )
  9. Regina Henschel ( 8 )
  10. Justin L ( 8 )

Triaged Bugs

523 bugs have been triaged by 67 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 109 )
  2. Buovjaga ( 80 )
  3. m_a_riosv ( 56 )
  4. Heiko Tietze ( 41 )
  5. Xisco Faulí ( 29 )
  6. Mike Kaganski ( 23 )
  7. Julien Nabet ( 17 )
  8. Rafael Lima ( 14 )
  9. Telesto ( 13 )
  10. V Stuart Foote ( 12 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

456 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

181 bugs have been fixed by 39 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 21 )
  2. Rafael Lima ( 13 )
  3. Caolán McNamara ( 9 )
  4. Justin Luth ( 8 )
  5. Michael Stahl ( 8 )
  6. László Németh ( 6 )
  7. Tibor Nagy ( 6 )
  8. Heiko Tietze ( 6 )
  9. Samuel Mehrbrodt ( 5 )
  10. Matt K ( 5 )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#155917 Writer crashes when inserting ODT file containing PDF into table in another ODT doc ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  2. tdf#158965 Find Record: Similarities dialog won’t appear ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  3. tdf#159243 Armenian characters displaying incorrectly (as boxes) on macOS (fonts not packaged properly) ( Thanks to Christian Lohmaier )
  4. tdf#159386 Selecting all in a certain table causes assert in SfxPoolItem::SetWhich with a debug build ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  5. tdf#73678 FORMATTING: Conditional Formatting lost when Click-drag Sheet2 tab to position 1 or adding, then

by x1sc0 at February 13, 2024 09:17 AM

February 11, 2024

Caolán McNamara

coverity 2022.6.0 and LibreOffice


After a long slog since November when the previous version of coverity was EOLed and we had to start using 2022.6.0 with its new suggestions for std::move etc, LibreOffice is now finally back to a 0 warnings coverity state

by caolan (noreply@blogger.com) at February 11, 2024 06:02 PM

February 06, 2024

Miklos Vajna

Fixing multi-view programming challenges in Calc and elsewhere

This post describes some challenges around having multiple views of one opened document in LibreOffice core, when those views belong to LOK views, representing different users, with their own language, locale and other view settings.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but is useful for all clients of the LOK API.

Motivation

LOK views are meant to represent separate users, so we need to make sure that when a user sets their preferences and trigger an action, then the response to that action goes to the correct view, with the correct view settings.

This is different from the desktop LibreOffice use-case, where multiple windows are still meant to share the same user name, language, undo stack and so on.

Results so far

In this post, I would like to present 4 small improvements that recently happened to the LOK API to provide this wanted separation of views.

The first was an issue where two users were editing the same document, one busily typing and the other clicked on a link in Calc. What could happen sometimes is the link popup appeared for the user who typed, not for the user who clicked on the link:

Link popup is actually on the left, should be on the right, now fixed

This specific problem can be fixed by making sure that link click callbacks are invoked synchronously (while the clicking view is still active) and not later, when the current view may or may not be the correct one.

It turns out the same problem (async command dispatch) affects not only hyperlinks, but many other cases as well, where we want to stay async, for example, when one dialog would invoke another dialog, like the Calc conditional format -> add dialog:

Calc conditional format add dialog appearing on the left, should be on the right, now fixed

There you don't want to change async commands into sync commands, because that may mean spinning the main loop inside a dialog, resulting in nested main loops. This can be fixed by making sure that async commands to be dispatched (sfx2 hints in general) are processed in a way that the current view at dispatch & processing is the same, which is now the case.

The third problem was around wrong language & locale in the status bar:

Unexpected English strings in localized statubar UI, now fixed

This is not simply a problem of missing translation, the trouble was that the status bar update is also async and by the time the update happened, the locale of the view on the left was used, for a string that appears on the right.

The way to fix this is to perform the update of toolbars/statusbar/etc (in general: SfxBindings) in a way that the language at job schedule time and at UI string creation time is the same.

The last problem was quite similar, still about bad language on the UI, but this time on the sidebar:

Unexpected English strings in localized sidebar UI, now fixed

This is similar to the statusbar case, but the sidebar has its own executor for its async jobs, so that needed a fix similar to what the statusbar already had, now done.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:

Want to start using this?

You can get the latest Collabora Online Development Edition 23.05 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (24.8).

by Miklos Vajna at February 06, 2024 08:49 AM

February 04, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

gbuild for Java tests – LibreOffice build system part 3

In this blog post, I discuss gbuild for Java tests. The goal is to write a Makefile to compile and run a JUnit test for LibreOffice. You can also refer to part 1 and part 2 for a brif overiew on gbuild, the LibreOffice build system.

Macro Examples from gbuild for Java Tests

In the first post on gbuild, I have mentioned some macro examples including gb_Output_announce which was used to print nice messages like the ones including “[CXX]”. Now let’s explain some more macros related to Java tests.

Consider that you want to compile and run a JUnitTest. To do that, you need to write the test in a Java file, and create a Makefile to run that.

This is an example for running a test defined in Java file sw/qa/complex/indeterminateState/CheckIndeterminateState.java.

$(eval $(call gb_JunitTest_JunitTest,sw_complex))

$(eval $(call gb_JunitTest_add_sourcefiles,sw_complex,\
sw/qa/complex/indeterminateState/CheckIndeterminateState \
))

$(eval $(call gb_JunitTest_use_unoapi_jars,sw_complex))

$(eval $(call gb_JunitTest_add_classes,sw_complex,\
complex.indeterminateState.CheckIndeterminateState \
))

The make file for running this Java test consists of calling multiple macros. It starts with gb_JunitTest_JunitTest macro, which defines the test by its name, sw_complex. This macro is defined in solenv/gbuild/JunitTest.mk. If you grep for define in the same file, you will see this result:

$ grep -w define solenv/gbuild/JunitTest.mk
define gb_JunitTest_JunitTest
define gb_JunitTest_set_defs
define gb_JunitTest_add_classes
define gb_JunitTest_add_class
define gb_JunitTest_add_sourcefile
define gb_JunitTest_add_sourcefiles
define gb_JunitTest_use_jar
define gb_JunitTest_use_jars
define gb_JunitTest_use_jar_classset
define gb_JunitTest_add_classpath
define gb_JunitTest_use_system_jar
define gb_JunitTest_use_system_jars
define gb_JunitTest_use_external
define gb_JunitTest_use_externals
define gb_JunitTest_use_customtarget
define gb_JunitTest_use_customtargets
define gb_JunitTest_use_unoapi_jars
define gb_JunitTest_use_unoapi_test_class
define gb_JunitTest_set_unoapi_test_defaults
define gb_JunitTest_JunitTest

To stick to the macros used in the above example, I describe these macros:

gb_JunitTest_add_sourcefiles: This macro adds a Java source file to the test. It defines the code that adds the sw/qa/complex/indeterminateState/CheckIndeterminateState.java to the test. But please note that you should drop the .java extension:

$(eval $(call gb_JunitTest_add_sourcefiles,sw_complex,\
sw/qa/complex/indeterminateState/CheckIndeterminateState \
))

The other macro gb_JunitTest_use_unoapi_jars, adds the UNO API JAR files to be used with the test.

And in the end, you need to add the test class name using gb_JunitTest_add_classes macro. The class name is visible in the end.

The result can be quite complex, but it works. 🙂

java.exe -Xmx64M -classpath "$W/JavaClassSet/JunitTest/sw_complex;C:/cygwin64/home/user/lode/opt/share/java/junit.jar;$I/program;$W/Jar/OOoRunner.jar;$I/program/classes/libreoffice.jar;$W/Jar/test.jar" -Dorg.openoffice.test.arg.soffice="path:$I/program/soffice" -Dorg.openoffice.test.arg.env=PATH="$PATH" -Dorg.openoffice.test.arg.user=file:///$W/JunitTest/sw_complex/user org.junit.runner.JUnitCore complex.indeterminateState.CheckIndeterminateState

The above is the actual command that runs the test. Please note that if you forget the gb_JunitTest_add_classes macro to define the class name, the test may compile, but it will not run.

As an example, you can see the below patch. This patch fixes the problem of the JUnit test not running:

Final Words

Many macros are available in gbuild, making easier to create Makefiles to compile and run tests, build libraries and executable applications and many other relevant tasks. The best way to find and understand these macros is to look at the Makefiles written by others to the same task. Look for .mk files, and if you want to see the implementation of the macros, look into solenv/gbuild/.

I will write more about gbuild macros in the next series of blog posts on gbuild.

by Hossein Nourikhah at February 04, 2024 11:42 AM

January 25, 2024

Marius Popa Adrian

Firebird 5.0 Is Released

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 5.0 — the latest major release of the Firebird relational database for Windows, Linux, MacOS and Android platforms.This release introduces improvements in areas of performance, multithreaded processing (including backup, restore, sweep), SQL queries profiling, with better scalability and numerous enhancements in SQL

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at January 25, 2024 10:29 AM

January 16, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 24.2 RC2 is available for testing

LibreOffice 24.2 – with a new year.month versioning scheme – will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2024 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 24.2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) the forth pre-release since the development of version 24.2 started in mid June, 2023. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 24.2 RC1, 113 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 61 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 24.2 RC2 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!

by x1sc0 at January 16, 2024 03:59 PM

January 12, 2024

LibreOffice Design Blog

Comments in Sidebar

Using comments is a key feature in text processing. A typical workflow might be to review a document where notes are made by different colleagues. LibreOffice Writer currently shows these comments in the document margin, which is limited to the page height, ending up in the need to scroll long text (even while editing [1]) and eventually in paging-like interactions if the number of comments exceed the total size.…

by Heiko Tietze at January 12, 2024 01:22 PM

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: December 2023

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 7.5.9 and 7.6.4 were announced on December 7
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) updated menu item paths in Help pages and updated and restructured dozens of help pages
  3. Rafael Lima fixed line count width in Writer file properties dialog, added a button leading to Download page in the dialog showing up if trying to access Help without offline files available and made it possible to enter edit mode for comments in Calc via Navigator. He also updated ScriptForge help and added a Help page about installing offline Help
  4. Stanislav Horacek did many fixes and cleanups in Help pages
  5. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) made it so multi-selection is no longer possible in Start Center as it is not actionable. He also streamlined the navigation layout of Help
  6. Stéphane Guillou (TDF) linked Sidebar decks to Help and did other Help updates
  7. Alain Romedenne updated ScriptForge help pages
  8. Dione Maddern updated Help for Draw’s Consolidate Text functionality
  9. Sophia Schröder did many cleanups in Help
  10. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) added support for XF86Forward / XF86Back key events for use in Impress slideshows and did code cleanups in the area of unused config keys and includes
  11. Laurent Balland did many fixes in Impress templates, collaborating with Jérôme Bouat
  12. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) worked on multi-page floating tables in Writer. He also updated pdfium and did fixes to automated tests
  13. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
  14. Michael Meeks (Collabora) fixed a deadlock
  15. Szymon Kłos, Áron Budea and Gökay Şatır (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  16. Nick Wingate (Collabora) added an option to define ranges when exporting Calc sheets to PDF
  17. Henry Castro (Collabora) made it so an error dialog pops up in Calc, if trying to insert a row after the maximum one
  18. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) fixed an issue with unwanted deletion of data ranges in Calc
  19. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) streamlined the OOXML import of headers/footers in page styles, made handling of embedded SVGs in FODT files more robust and added support for writing SVG images into OOXML using the MS OOXML extension. He also did lots of refactoring in the EditEngine text editing code
  20. Julien Nabet fixed an issue with changing field options in Firebird databases, implemented more user management functionality for MySQL and MariaDB databases, made colour handling more robust in sparklines, fixed an issue with stepped line types in XY scatter charts and fixed StepTime being ignored with AnimatedImages in Basic Dialog (together with bug reporter Jurassic Pork). He also fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and did many code cleanups
  21. Andreas Heinisch made Mail Merge more robust with regards to database names
  22. László Németh continued polishing support for smart justify found in DOCX files and fixed an issue with soft hyphens not being displayed in text boxes and shapes
  23. Xisco Faulí (TDF) did many improvements and additions to automated tests and fixed regressions
  24. Michael Stahl (allotropia) revamped ODF encryption resulting in much faster saving and loading, better resistance to tampering, better hiding of metadata and higher resistance to brute forcing. He also fixed a Writer crash related to text formatting of group shapes anchored as character
  25. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) continued polishing the handling and detection of broken ZIP packages (document containers), improved the load time of DOCX files with hundreds of images, fixed issues with incorrect Math formula font size and Escape key not closing formula editor (not in any released version), fixed undoing the first applied cell formatting in Calc, fixed an issue with unwanted extra empty paragraphs appearing after a table before a section break in DOCX files, made line breaking in Writer behave according to Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm rules, fixed an issue with line breaks in justified right aligned text and fixed an issue with applying Calc cell styles. He also fixed many crashes and did many code cleanups and improvements to automated tests
  26. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) optimised Calc’s performance and fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers
  27. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on the online update feature. He also did many code cleanups and adapted the code to compiler changes
  28. Noel Grandin (Collabora) continued polishing the renovation of bitmap alpha handling. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  29. Justin Luth (Collabora) made it so the Select Outline Format split button in the Properties Sidebar deck in Writer now opens Bullets and Numbering dialog and its Outline tab, if you click on the button part, fixed handling of legacy dropdown fields direct bold and char settings in DOCX and RTF files, fixed a page break issues in RTF import, made it so there is no longer a possibility to get into a restart/reinstall loop after installing an extension and fixed an issue with losing selection in Writer after right-clicking the last half character
  30. Michael Weghorn (TDF) made it so listboxes don’t take mouse wheel input, if mouse is not positioned over them and fixed accessibility issues in areas such as heading levels and checkable items. He also did many updates and cleanups to the LibreOffice Android Viewer code
  31. Balázs Varga (allotropia) fixed an issue causing a huge number of unwanted master slides appearing in PPTX import and continued working on proper indications for locked down items in Options
  32. Patrick Luby (NeoOffice) continued improving the scrolling performance on macOS, fixed an issue causing unwanted horizontal scrolling in Calc on macOS, eliminated flickering upon window resizing in macOS with Skia/Metal and fixed clipboard contents causing trouble with clipboard recorders on macOS. He also fixed some macOS crashes
  33. Jim Raykowski made comment threads appear grouped in the Navigator, made images with broken links easier to find in the Navigator and implemented a feature to identify the objects in a layer by hovering with the mouse over layer tabs
  34. Sarper Akdemir (allotropia) added an option to disable active content such as DDE commands and OLE objects
  35. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) fixed a Windows AARCH64 build issue
  36. Chris Sherlock refactored text rendering code
  37. Regina Henschel implemented curved connector routing method used in OOXML files
  38. Sahil Gautam continued polishing the feature for highlighting the current row and column in spreadsheets
  39. Irgaliev Amin improved math formula compatibility with Microsoft Office
  40. Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) did many improvements to the Expert Configuration and macro signature confirmation dialogs and made it so dialog button accelerators work without Alt key on Windows
  41. Thorsten Behrens (allotropia) did code and build cleanups, for example improving build reproducibility
  42. Armin Le Grand (allotropia) continued with the rework of handling attributes and properties
  43. Oliver Specht (CIB) fixed issues with numbering losing its text colour in DOCX import, handling toggled text formatting properties in DOCX files, paragraphs imported without numbering from RTF files, list of Calc comments not updating automatically and checkbox sizes being imported wrong from RTF files
  44. Matt K fixed displaying dialogs in Calc’s full screen mode
  45. Martin Gube added an automated test
  46. Taichi Haradaguchi updated some dependencies
  47. René Engelhard did some build fixes
  48. David Gilbert did code cleanups
  49. Adam Seskunas added an automated test
  50. Andras Timar (Collabora) fixed shape colour not being imported in Visio files
  51. Ricardo Donino ported a Draw Java SDK example to Python
  52. Theppitak Karoonboonyanan added Thai AutoCorrect data
  53. Jonathan Clark made it so BASIC CCur function obeys locale setting
  54. Li Yang improved menu highlight text colour in high contrast mode on Windows
  55. Arnaud Versini did some code cleanups

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

453 bugs, 71 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 283 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 33 )
  2. Telesto ( 17 )
  3. Jérôme ( 16 )
  4. Eyal Rozenberg ( 11 )
  5. Rafael Lima ( 11 )
  6. Xisco Faulí ( 9 )
  7. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 8 )
  8. Tracey ( 6 )
  9. Regina Henschel ( 6 )
  10. William Friedman ( 6 )

Triaged Bugs

412 bugs have been triaged by 64 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 79 )
  2. m.a.riosv ( 58 )
  3. Heiko Tietze ( 27 )
  4. Buovjaga ( 26 )
  5. Julien Nabet ( 23 )
  6. raal ( 21 )
  7. Xisco Faulí ( 19 )
  8. Dieter ( 18 )
  9. ady ( 18 )
  10. V Stuart Foote ( 14 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

438 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

153 bugs have been fixed by 32 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 14 )
  2. Balazs Varga ( 11 )
  3. Patrick Luby ( 8 )
  4. Julien Nabet ( 8 )
  5. Laurent Balland ( 8 )
  6. Caolán McNamara ( 7 )
  7. Justin Luth ( 6 )
  8. Noel Grandin ( 6 )
  9. Samuel Mehrbrodt ( 6 )
  10. Rafael Lima ( 3 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#154339 Plain text copied to clipboard and pasted to CSV is not saved. ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#123396 LO Writer automatically replaces SVGs embedded in FODT files with an embedded low-resolution PNGs and drops the SVGs from the documents ( Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl )
  2. tdf#123864 No feedback for screen reader when radio button for underline attribute changes ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  3. tdf#154044 Undoing the first applied cell formatting only works for column A ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  4. tdf#155266 VIEWING / SCROLLING: very laggy jerky scrolling on macOS Intel Writer: scroll lag ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  5. tdf#157915 Error UNO type of C++ when running a Basic macro with instruction commitChanges for org.openoffice.Office.Commands/Execute/Disabled ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  6. tdf#158223 Charts: Data range will be deleted when deleting following sheet ( Thanks to Eike Rathke )
  7. tdf#158379 Crash when trying to print specific RTF file (macOS) ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  8. tdf#158551 Crash in: mdds::mtv::soa::multi_type_vector::cbegin() const on Paste Special with Operation ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  9. tdf#33201 UI: Highlight (not select) current row and column in spreadsheet ( Thanks to Sahil )
  10. tdf#60558 FILEOPEN DOCX: floating table w/parallel wrap followed by an inline table doesn’t wrap beside in empty space on right ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#140401 LibreOffice crashed due to custom installed fonts ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  2. tdf#156820 Crash when changing color with custom colour picker accessed from overflowing toolbar ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  3. tdf#158379 Crash when trying to print specific RTF file (macOS) ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  4. tdf#158450 Crash when picking custom colour for column separator line ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  5. tdf#158505 Crash exporting Writer file with bibliography to PDF ( Thanks to Vojtěch Doležal )
  6. tdf#158551 Crash in: mdds::mtv::soa::multi_type_vector::cbegin() const on Paste Special with Operation ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  7. tdf#158593 Expert dialog crashes when editing locked down “set” configuration ( Thanks to Stephan Bergmann )
  8. tdf#158686 FILEOPEN RTF Crash when changing to print preview ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
  9. tdf#158703 Crash if I use the space bar several times and then punctuation (French Locale) ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  10. tdf#158720 Crash for attribute string search (“oo”, “uno”, “ooname”) in the Expert Configuration dialog ( Thanks to Samuel Mehrbrodt )
  11. tdf#158794 Pasting a DDE link into a footnote / endnote crashes ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  12. tdf#158837 Crash in: int rtl::str::indexOfStr_WithLength(char16_t const*, int, char16_t const*, int) ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  13. tdf#158862 LibreOffice crashes when attempting to inspect a UNO object in the Watch Window during debugging after successful initial inspection. ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#111969 right-click on right half of last character in selection loses the selection (Writer) ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  2. tdf#117651 AutoCorrect does not change preexisting text inside /slashes/ to italics, nor change -strikethrough- ( Thanks to Matt K )
  3. tdf#123396 LO Writer automatically replaces SVGs embedded in FODT files with an embedded low-resolution PNGs and drops the SVGs from the documents ( Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl )
  4. tdf#123864 No feedback for screen reader when radio button for underline attribute changes ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )

by x1sc0 at January 12, 2024 12:14 PM

January 03, 2024

Miklos Vajna

Multi-page floating tables in Writer: tables wrapping tables

This post is part of a series to describe how Writer now gets a feature to handle tables that are both floating and span over multiple pages.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but is useful on the desktop as well. See the 10th post for the previous part.

Motivation

Previous posts described the hardest part of multi-page floating tables: making sure that text can wrap around them and they can split across pages. In this part, we'll look at a case where that content is not just text, but the wrapping content itself is also a table.

Results so far

Regarding testing of the floating table feature in general, the core.git repository has 92 files now which are focusing on correct handling of floating tables (filenames matching floattable-|floating-table-). This doesn't count cases where the document model is built using C++ code in the memory and then we assert the result of some operation.

Here are some screenshots from the improvements this month:

Improved click handling near the first page of a floating table

The first screenshot shows a situation where the mouse cursor is near the right edge of the first page of a floating table. What used to happen is we found this position close to the invisible anchor of the floating table on that page, then corrected this position to be at the real anchor on the last page. In short, the user clicked on one page and we jumped to the last page. This is now fixed, we notice that part of the floating table is close to the click position and we correct the cursor to be at the closest position inside the table's content.

A floating table, wrapped by an inline table: old, new and reference rendering

The next screenshot shows a floating table where the content wrapping around the table happens to be an inline table. You can see how such wrapping didn't happen in the past, and the new rendering is close to the reference now.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:

Want to start using this?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office 23.05 and try it out yourself right now: try the unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (24.8).

by Miklos Vajna at January 03, 2024 02:15 PM

December 18, 2023

Marius Popa Adrian

Call For Testing Firebird ODBC Driver for Firebird 3.x

The new version of Firebird ODBC driver is in Beta stage now. Version 3.0.0 Beta is available for testing on Windows. It works only with Firebird 3+ , and requires fbclient.dll from Firebird 3 or above.https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird-odbc-driver/wikiPlease download, test, and report any issues!Issues can be reported here: https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird-odbc-driver/issuesOriginal

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at December 18, 2023 07:20 PM

December 04, 2023

Miklos Vajna

Multi-page floating tables in Writer: UI improvements

This post is part of a series to describe how Writer now gets a feature to handle tables that are both floating and span over multiple pages.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but is useful on the desktop as well. See the 9th post for the previous part.

Motivation

Previous posts described the hardest part of multi-page floating tables: reading them from documents, so we layout and render them. In this part, you can read about UI improvements when it comes to creating, updating and deleting them in Writer.

Results so far

Regarding testing of the floating table feature in general, the core.git repository has 89 files now which are focusing on correct handling of floating tables (filenames matching floattable-|floating-table-). This doesn't count cases where the document model is built using C++ code in the memory and then we assert the result of some operation.

Here are some screenshots from the improvements this month:

Improved insertion of floating tables

The first screenshot shows that the underlying LibreOffice Insert Frame dialog is now async (compatible with collaborative editing) and is now exposed in the Collabora Online notebookbar.

There were other improvements as well, so in case you select a whole table and insert a new frame, the result is close to what the DOCX import creates to floating tables. This includes a default frame width that matches the table width, and also disabling frame borders, since the table can already have one.

Unfloating a floating table

The next screenshot shows an inserted floating table, where the context menu allows updating the properties of an already inserted floating table, and also allows to delete ("unfloat") it.

Several of these changes are shared improvements between LibreOffice and Collabora Online, so everyone benefits. For example, inserting a frame when a whole table was selected also cleared the undo stack, which is now fixed. Or unfloating table was only possible if some part of the table was clipped, but now this is always possible to do.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:

Want to start using this?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office 23.05 and try it out yourself right now: try the unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (24.2).

by Miklos Vajna at December 04, 2023 03:26 PM

November 19, 2023

Stephan Bergmann

I like it here. Can I stay?

(And do you have a vacancy for a back-scrubber?)

Thank you, Red Hat, for generously letting me work for so long on stuff that is near and dear to my heart. At the intersection of theory and practice, of compiler technology and the LibreOffice code base. But, to keep doing what I love, I need to move on.

So, thank you, allotropia, for having me. I’m excited.

And, above all, thank you, LibreOffice, family of friends. Lets make sure to keep this a happy family, one that Tolstoy would have nothing to write home about. With quarrels and arguments, for sure; feud even. But happy at heart. I wish to keep meeting you all for years to come, virtually, and for a feast at FOSDEM or LOCon. And booze.

To paraphrase Hamburger Tafel (donations needed, btw), “Wir haben LibreOffice noch lange nicht satt.”

Have fun, stay safe, peace,
sberg

by stbergmann at November 19, 2023 10:58 AM

November 12, 2023

Robert Riemann

Is developing word processing software hard?

Hello LibreOffice Planet!

This is my first blog post on the topic of LibreOffice. Let me quickly explain my link to LibreOffice. I work for a data protection authority in the EU and help navigate the digital transformation of our office with about 100 staff members. While many of our partner organisations adopt Microsoft 365, our office decided to pilot Nextcloud with Collabora Office Online.

In the future, I want to blog (in my personal capacity) about my thoughts related to the use of alternative word processing software in the public sector in general and in our specific case.

As there are no dedicated resources for training, preparation of templates etc., during the pilot of LibreOffice, the experience so far covers a large spectrum of user satisfaction. Generally, our staff has been spent years of their life using Microsoft Office and has the expectation that any other software works the same way. If it does not, they send an email to me (best case) or switch back to Microsoft Office.

During the week, I discussed again some smaller LibreOffice bugs. Then, I showed this weekend some FOSS Blender animated short videos to family members. It seems that Blender is more successful in its domain than LibreOffice. Is that possible? Or are animated short videos just more capturing due to their special effects? 😅

You can watch the 1min Blender animated short movie “CREST� on Youtube or the making-off. The latter you find here below.

I find it very inspiring to see what talented artists can do with Blender. For my part, I have once installed Blender and deinstalled it. Back then it was not easy to use for people not familiar with video animation software. Blender competes with proprietary software such as Maya or Cinema 4D. The latter is about 60 USD per month in the annual subscription plan. Not exactly cheap.

Then, I read in the fediverse about people working with LibreOffice:

I just tried to use #LibreOffice #Draw to draw some arrows and boxes onto JPEG images for emphasizing stuff.

The UX is really bad for somebody not working with Draw all the time.

Whatever I do, instead of drawing onto the image, the image gets selected instead.

Could not find any layer-sidebar.

Could not scale text without starting the “Character …� menu, modifying font size blindly + confirming > just to see its effect and then start all over.

Dear #FOSS, we really should do better.

— Author Karl Voit (12 November 2023 at 14:51)

In my past, I have worked on online voting systems. They are not very good yet despite years of efforts. xkcd dedicated a comic to voting software

Elections seem simple—aren’t they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers.

— Author Matthew Bernhard et al. in their paper Public Evidence from Secret Ballots from 2017

What is the unique challenge of developing word processing software? Happy to hear back from you in the blog comments or on the companion fediverse post!

by Robert Riemann (robert@riemann.cc) at November 12, 2023 10:20 PM

November 01, 2023

Marius Popa Adrian

Valgrind 3.22 is available

News via reddit : "We are pleased to announce a new release of Valgrind, version 3.22.0,available from https://valgrind.org/downloads/current.html.See the release notes below for details of changes.Our thanks to all those who contribute to Valgrind's development. Thisrelease represents a great deal of time, energy and effort on the partof many people.Happy and productive debugging and

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at November 01, 2023 02:01 PM

October 27, 2023

Naruhiko Ogasawara

LOUCA23 (LibreOffice Conference Asia x UbuCon Asia 2023)

Long time no see, readers!  Very sorry for my laziness.


I attended LibreOffice Conference Asia x UbuCon Asia 2023 (LOUCA23) in Surakarta, Indonesia, on October 7~8.

This was the second time LibreOffice Conference Asia has been held in Tokyo in 2019, as it could not occur due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  UbuCon Asia was first held online in 2021, and the first in-person event was held in Seoul, Korea in 2022, and this still was the second in-person event.

I was burnt out by the pandemic and had stopped most of my OSS activities, but I still had many friends in the OSS world, so I went to Indonesia to meet with them.  

Therefore, I had initially intended to be a general participant.  Still, a friend of the speaker was suddenly unable to attend due to illness, so I gave a presentation in his place.  Here is my slide:

As mentioned, I am halfway out of OSS activities, but I know what my friends are doing, so it was not so difficult to talk about this subject.

Although I cannot say that the presentation itself was a great success (due to my English language skills), I was pleased because the audience was very responsive and easy to talk to, and many people approached me after the presentation was over.

Other than my presentation, I was naturally interested in the two keynote speeches by The Document Foundation and was surprised and grateful when Franklin Weng mentioned my name as an "Asian activist to be featured at the LibreOffice Latin America Conference. "

I listened to Muhammad Syazwan Md Khusaini's "Hands-On on Translating in Ubuntu" with great interest; however, I was a bit surprised to hear from a friend that many Indonesians use English for desktop environments and applications like LibreOffice.  I recognized that this was quite different from Japan.

The event itself was just as enthusiastic. Unlike OSS events in Japan (laugh), the participants were young, and there were many women. I was also surprised to see junior high school students among the speakers.

Both lunch and dinner were complimentary, and the one-day Surakaruta city tour the day after the event was delightful.  I appreciated the hospitality of the local staff.

This was my first time in Indonesia, and although short, I enjoyed many things, including the train trip. In Yogyakarta, I visited a museum and learned a lot about the history of Indonesia. However, I was overcharged by the tuk-tuk in Yogya.



I know it was a lot of work for the organizers, but as I have many friends in LibreOffice and am also an Ubuntu user, I was very grateful that the two events were co-hosted. Thanks to all the sponsors, global/local organizers, and everyone who talked to me there.  See you soon!


by Naruhiko Ogasawara (noreply@blogger.com) at October 27, 2023 01:13 PM

October 11, 2023

Marius Popa Adrian

Firebird 5.0 Release Candidate 1 is available for testing

Firebird Project announces the first Release Candidate of Firebird 5.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing on all supported platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android).This Release Candidate demonstrates the complete set of features and improvements developed for the new release. Release Candidates are generally considered stable enough

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at October 11, 2023 02:47 PM

Flamerobin 0.9.9 Snapshot released with a few fixes

Flamerobin 0.9.9 Snapshot released with a few fixesWhat’s Changed :Fix Mac OS compilation by @rlakis in #328Fix saving style error and code scanning alert by @arvanus in #330Improve SQL statistics by @arvanus in #331New Contributors :@rlakis made their first contribution in #328

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at October 11, 2023 02:46 PM

August 26, 2023

Bayram Çiçek

Final Report - Google Summer of Code 2023 - Search Field in Options

About project

LibreOffice is a complex application with a large and growing number of options. It is not easy to find the right needle in the haystack. Like most other complex applications, it will be valuable and useful enhancement to add a search field to the “Tools > Options” dialog that iterates over the various tabs and filters where the search text is found. The Search Field in Options project aims to provide this search functionality in “Tools > Options” page.

Tasks

  •   Add search field to Options dialog - UI
  •   Implement search function
  •   Include Options TreeView’s parent and child node names into searching
  •   Add GetAllStrings() method to fetch strings from 69 dialogs step by step
  •   Include following element strings into searching:
    •   labels
    •   check buttons
    •   radio buttons
    •   toggle buttons
    •   link buttons
    •   buttons
  •   Include accessibility elements into searching:
    •   accessible-names
    •   accessible-descriptions
    •   tooltip-texts
  •   Include option pages from extensions into searching
  •   Initialize all dialogs at background if it’s possible (salhelper::Thread - asynchronously)
  •   Initialize all dialogs to get strings properly (not in background - synchronously)
    •   initialize ~half of them after opening the options
    •   and initialize remaining ones after doing a search
  •   Update Options TreeView properly after the searching done
  •   Expand the first node and select first child-node after search by default
  •   Remove Hyphen (_) and Tilde (~) symbols from fetched strings to make the search function work correctly

My Work during GSoC

During 13 weeks GSoC program, I added a search field in Options dialog and included the node names and their .ui strings into searching. Since sub-dialogs under the Options are not initialized at startup of Options dialog, it was not possible to access their .ui strings. To overcome this issue we had two options:

  • Option A: Extract .ui strings at build-time and fetch them at run-time
    This option requires working on file operations, LibreOffice’s build system, makefiles, localization etc. I worked on this option for ~5 weeks but this approach caused a lot of issues that took the project out of its scope. For example, how to deal with localization issue while extracting strings at build-time? This was another big problem…
  • Option B: Initialize all dialogs in some way and get their strings
    This option is more understandable and simple. Instructions are clear. No need to worry about localization. No need to work on file operations, extracting and fetching data, working with makefiles etc…

When I felt that Option A is just wasting my time (~5 weeks); I switched to Option B where I can -at least- make some progress. The main issue in Option B was initializing all dialogs which takes about 4-8 secs. I tried to initialize them at background but there was some errors on Win10 that I don’t reproduce the issue on my linux machine. Then I tried to see the errors on Win10 with a virtual machine, but it was too slow to test. Therefore I uninstalled Manjaro/Linux (which I’ve been using it more than 1.5 years) from my computer and had to install Win10 (which I last used 6 years ago) on my machine to see the problems in there. There was some visual inconsistencies while initializing sub-dialogs using salhelper::Thread at background.

After working long hours for weeks meanwhile the time was running out, I decided to initialize almost half of them at Options dialog startup and the remaining ones at the time of searching. In that way, time of initializing process is divided by ~2 which can be acceptable time in some degree in terms of user experience.

There is a single patch on Gerrit for this project: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/152519. The patch has more than 30 patchsets and includes “+2255 -47” changes.

The most challenging part was implementing GetAllStrings() function for every ~69 dialogs step by step. Current implementation may not be the best solution for user experience, but at least searching through the numerous options is now possible.

options-dialog-on-Win10.png

Whats left to do or can be done?

Following tasks are left and can be implemented after GSoC:

  •   Include accessibility elements into searching:
    •   accessible-names
    •   accessible-descriptions
    •   tooltip-texts
  •   Include option pages from extensions into searching
  •   Initialize all dialogs at background if it’s possible (salhelper::Thread - asynchronously)

Additional hacks

  • Show modified options with some special indicator (as in KDE settings). (better to discuss this idea in a separate ticket)
  • Implement highlighting feature

Tasks I’ll be working on after GSoC

  • improvement on the initialization of the dialogs, maybe it can be possible to initialize them at background without encountering any visual inconsistencies - especially on Windows.
  • Implementing the remaining tasks:
    • Include accessibility elements into searching
    • Include option pages from extensions into searching
  • If everything works fine I’d like to work on the highlighting feature
  • Also it would be prettier if Options dialog have a modified options indicator (as in KDE settings)

Thanks

I’m very happy that we all reached the end of GSoC. During that time, I know that I had a responsibility for doing everything that I can. Therefore I worked hard and tried to complete as much tasks as I can.

I learned a lot of things during the GSoC. Although GSoC is finished, I will definitely continue to contribute to LibreOffice. I am really happy to be a part of the LibreOffice community and Google Summer of Code. I’m really thankful to LibreOffice and Google for providing us this such a great opportunity which helped me gain this amazing experience!

I always tried to be active on IRC #libreoffice-dev channel, and I want to thank for everybody who helped me about my questions.

And most importantly, greatly thankful to Andreas Heinisch and Heiko Tietze who were my mentors throughout the GSoC period. They always guided me everything about my questions. Thank you endlessly for your time and effort. I appreciate that you always motivating and encouraging me in all that I attempt and do. I can never truly express how grateful I am. Your guidance, reviews, help and shared experiences have been invaluable. Thank you very much for everything.

I’d like to express my gratitude to everyone in the LibreOffice community for their help and kindness. They always tried to answer my questions on IRC. I fell very lucky to work with this amazing community. I have learned a lot from you and I will never forget this wonderful experience.

Regards,
Bayram Çiçek

All weekly GSoC reports:

Useful links:

# free as in freedom

by Bayram Çiçek at August 26, 2023 09:00 AM

August 25, 2023

Ahmed Gamal Eltokhy

Final Report

The past four months working on LibreOffice for Google Summer of Code 2023 have been an amazing learning experience. With the help of mentors Thorsten, Heiko, and Hossein, I implemented features to improve the user experience around digital signing and encryption like remembering recipients, better recipient selection UI, fast searching/filtering of keys, and documentation. My 12 patches were merged and it was incredible contributing to open source with the friendly LibreOffice community. I look forward to more FOSS contributions in the future!

August 25, 2023 12:25 PM

August 23, 2023

Caolán McNamara

Small Caps in Impress

Writer supports Small Caps, but Impress and drawing shapes in general never fully supported Small Caps. The option was available, and the character dialog provided a preview, but Small Caps was rendered the same as All Caps, as seen here.

 This has lingered for years and it's not easy as a user to try and manually workaround with varying font sizes because underline/overline/strike-through decorations won't link up, as seen in this example:


 but finally for Collabora Hack Week I was able to carve out some time to fix this. So in today's LibreOffice trunk we finally have this implemented as:

In addition a buggy case seen in the preview of double overlines for mixed upper/lower case was also fixed, from:

to:


Also noticed during all of this was the wrong width scaling used for the red wave line underneath incorrect spelling in impress when the text is superscript or subscript so the line didn't stretch over the whole text, as seen here: 

Now corrected as:

and finally added was a missing implementation in the RTF export of shape text to allow the small caps format to be copy and pasted into other applications from impress.

by caolan (noreply@blogger.com) at August 23, 2023 04:01 PM

August 21, 2023

Björn Michaelsen

How to survive being bought by Oracle

How to survive being bought by Oracle?

When I wrote Quo vadis with The Document Foundation? a month ago, that was mostly a side product of sorting out my thoughts on open source governance in general, and on LibreOffice in particular. And while that sparked some discussion on the identity of the LibreOffice project, mostly here on Board Discuss, it ultimately was preparation for a talk Thorsten and me had submitted for a vacation on Chaos Communication Camp 2023. Our preparation was somewhat chaotic -- because both Thorsten and me decided to get very creative about the "dont come by car" suggestion by the organizers and our talk being scheduled on the first day of the event -- so we ended up honouring the LibreOffice tradition of finishing slides only hours before the scheduled slot.

The session itself did not seem to have suffered too much by this -- it was more free form, which might actually have been a bonus. We ended up even being allowed to use some extra time for Q&A as there was quite some interest for that in the audience.

The video recording can be found on media.ccc.de and describes both bits of the history of the LibreOffice fork a decade ago and lessons learned that are still relevant for open source communities forking (or otherwise reorganizing themselves) today.

A huge thank you to all the volunteers that made #CCCamp23 (and therefore this talk) happen, especially c3voc for the recording and c3cert who did a great job in checking a minor injury I suffered due to my own stupidity during the event.

Comments? Feedback? Additions? Most welcome here on the fediverse !

August 21, 2023 06:00 AM

August 19, 2023

Ahmed Gamal Eltokhy

Week 10 11 Report

I'm providing an update after 10 weeks working on LibreOffice. I have successfully completed all the requirements I originally proposed related to improving the user interface for digital certificates and signatures. This includes developing a mechanism to remember selected recipients, improving the recipient selection UI, enabling intelligent searching of large keyrings, improving UI latency, and adding filtering for search results. I'm very pleased with the progress made so far. Going forward, I plan to focus on enhancing the documentation for the xmlsecurity module and addressing any bugs related to digital signatures. I'm very grateful to several LibreOffice developers, including Thorsten Behrens, Heiko Tietze, and Hossein Nourikhah, who provided excellent guidance during this project. While I'm sad this journey is nearly over, I achieved my goals and learned a lot along the way. I look forward to continuing to contribute to LibreOffice in the future.

August 19, 2023 04:18 PM